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Don’t Say a Word

The Yankees were leading, 5-3, in Toronto last night, and when Mariano Rivera came in in the bottom of the ninth to lock the Blue Jays down the YES Network telecasters Ken Singleton and David Cone began to talk about his performance this year—no runs allowed so far, in nine games. Eight and one-third innings pitched, and an earned-run average of 0.00.

“Don’t talk about it,” my wife, Carol, said. She’d turned out the light on her side of the bed, and was listening, not watching.

“Oh, no, not again,” I said.

Carol said nothing. Maybe she’d just gone to sleep.

“Listen, the Times even had a piece about him this morning,” I said. “Joe Girardi said Mo is phenomenal. The man is forty-one years old.”

Yunel Escobar, the first Toronto batter, hit a double to deep center field.

“See?” Carol said.

I groaned. Singleton and Cone went on about Mo, who’d not allowed a single base on balls to date, to twenty-nine batters, while Travis Snider grounded to Robinson Cano and was thrown out at first, moving Escobar to third. Jose Bautista ran the count to three and oh, and Mariano’s next pitch, a sinker, bounced under the catcher Russell Martin’s glove and through his legs for a wild pitch, as Escobar scored. There went Mo’s zeroes.

“See?” Carol said. “They shouldn’t talk about this stuff in advance.”

“Jeez, that had nothing to do with this!” I cried. “That’s their job! You know how I hate it when you do this.”

The run meant nothing, Ken and David agreed. It was the next base-runner that mattered.

Bautista walked. The Blue Jay first baseman Adam Lind hit a bloop to center that fell in for a single, and Bautista scurried around to third. Carol, still face-down on her pillow, moved slightly away from me on the bed.

The next batter, the second baseman John McDonald, batting from the right side, had to deal with a tough middle-high pitch but still got his bat up enough to tap a little bunt up the first-base side on a safety squeeze, and Bautista scored. Tie game; blown save. Loud noises in Toronto; indecipherable sounds, but probably not laughter, from Carol.

“Great bunt,” I said in a quietly mature manner. There was another hit, then a double play, and the Jays didn’t win it until the tenth.

This discussion has gone on for thirty-nine years, and I am way ahead—ahead by a thousand miles. Where’s the fun of it if you can’t look forward in sports? What’s the sense of not cheering, not even fucking talking, when you’re ahead?

“See?” Carol started to say this morning but didn’t. She knows I’m right.

AP Photo/Kathy Willens

Roger Angell, a senior editor and a staff writer, has contributed to The New Yorker since 1944, and became a fiction editor in 1956.